The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym By Edgar Allan PoeThe Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written
by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the
young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the
Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including
shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of
the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters
continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter
hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The
novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.The
story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it
becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to
present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of
sea voyages, and drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds and referenced
the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea.
Analyses of the novel often focus on the potential autobiographical
elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final
lines of the work.Difficulty in finding literary success early in his
short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work.
A few serialized installments of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger,
though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two
volumes. Some critics responded negatively to the work for being too
gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised
its exciting adventures. Poe himself later called it "a very silly
book". In the years since its publication, The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket became an influential work, notably for Herman
Melville and Jules Verne.Arthur Gordon Pym was born on the island of
Nantucket, famous for its fishing harbor and whaling. His best friend,
Augustus Barnard, is the son of the captain of a whaling ship. One
night, the two boys become drunk and decide, on Augustus's whim, to take
advantage of the breeze and sail out on Pym's sailboat, the Ariel. The
breeze, however, turns out to be the beginnings of a violent storm. The
situation gets critical when Augustus passes out drunk, and the
inexperienced Pym must take control of the dinghy.
